Urdu poetry has got some genres named after the number of lines they have, like ruba’i (four-line poem) and mukhammas (five-line poem). While ruba’i is still practised, mukhammas has not been followed by the contemporary poets. There is another new genre that has recently emerged and is getting popular among the youth. It’s called ashra, due to the 10 lines it contains. An ashra mostly deals with social and political issues, ranging from suicide blasts, children’s rape scams, literary festivals and terrorism and of course politics. It is vibrant with satire and has a tinge of dark humour.

The poet behind this new genre is Gujranwala-born Idris Babur who is settled in Lahore. He says the idea of this new form was triggered by political events.

“I wanted a change in the system. So I was supporting Imran Khan’s sit-ins in Islamabad in 2014. However, as the movement progressed, it became absurd, obscene and ridiculous at the same time which created a sort of angst in me. I wanted to change the system but I was a part of it and the way political (or not so political) events took turns during and after the sit-ins created a situation which was something like tragi-comedy,” says Babur.

To describe the situation and his own discontent, he started writing a long poem under the title, Shahrah-i-Bedastoor, taking a dig at the events unfolding on Shahrah-i-Dastoor (Constitution Avenue) where the sit-in was being held. But he was not satisfied with it. He started looking for other genres to give vent to his emotions. He thought of writing limericks. A form of poetry, consisting of five lines, limerick is humorous and sometimes obscene and Babur thought it would be the best medium to describe the situation he was confronting.

“But I found limerick restrictive due to its metre and regular rhyme scheme. I didn’t want to be bound by any classical form of poetry or practised genre. To me, free verse had got outdated and ghazal had limited scope for drastic experimentation. So I increased five lines of limerick to 10 lines and made it free of rhyme or metre. This is how ashra came into being.”

Idris Babur calls ashra a critique of any situation, saying it does not confront any form of Urdu poetry, ghazal, free verse or prose poem. He thinks that the generations of poets after Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Habib Jalib had got disconnected from their society as well as the younger generations and they are using same outdated symbols, metaphors, language and technique. He says through ashra, he transcends his generation and preceding generations and communicates with the new generation.

Babur’s senior poets are not that welcoming to this new form. He refers to them giving comments like, “Idris was a good poet and why did he get involved into this rubbish (ashra).” However, he claims, all are not against this new poetic experiment as it has found admirers in some senior poets and writers like Afzal Ahmed Syed and Ajmal Kamal.

Though Babur says that ashra doesn’t have any restrictions except its 10 lines, he has himself adopted a style which has evolved with the passage of time, containing satire, humour and pun. Most of his ashras follow a kind of rhyme too, though irregular. He uses Punjabi and English words and expressions also. And he has written ashras in Punjabi, English and Norwegian as well though a bulk of them is in Urdu.

“There is no agenda in this genre. The new poets can bring in their own language, themes, humour and style. I can’t define its rules. But certain situations demand a corresponding treatment like ashras on Quetta and APS school attack would be different from those on any other topic,” Babur says. Due to this freedom, he claims, the younger people from the places away from metropolises in the areas like Kashmir, Loralai and Kot Addu have started writing it.

Idris Babur did engineering from UET Lahore and lived in Norway from 2000 to 2010. His only book of poetry, Yunhi, was published from Lahore in 2012. The manuscript of a book of ashras and another of ghazals are complete but he is not sure when they would be published. These days he is working on a project of the Academy of Letters. Here is one of his ashras that he had written on the child abuse scam of Kasur, under the title of Bekasur.

Bachay Bangkok mein bhi rultay hein/jism New York mein bhi tultay hein/qatl Venice mein bhi utnay hotay hein/rape Paris mein jitney hotay hein/dou sau chorasi kitnay hotay hein?/ dedh dou lakh tou hazoor nahi/jo hua sub khuda ki marzi thi/kya krain jub khuda ki marzi thi/aur khuda deray say tou duur nahi/yaan kisi ka koi kasur nahi.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2017